#script lichen

[lichenaday]

Platygramme caesiopruinosa

images: source | source

[wild-e-eep]

Some lovely, scribbly script lichen.

iNaturalist obs 255326099

[plantlegs]

do you guys like lichens? cuz i like lichens. Here are some lichens. Specifically, red-fruited fairy cup lichen, trumpet lichen, and script lichen! I’ve never seen the fairy cups or script lichen in their fruiting stages, so it was exciting for me to see them thriving in a place I travel so often. These photos were taken in late november or early december of 2020.

[thebashfulbotanist]

Script lichens are named for their strange, sometimes branching lirellae, a type of apothecia (spore-bearing structure) that sometimes looks like letters, or at least, alien letters. This one is likely Graphis scripta, though I’d have to look under a scope to be sure. They usually grow on tree bark, as seen here.

[microcosmicobservations]

If you look closely, there are at least 5 species of lichen growing on this live oak (Quercus virginiana), including a script lichen and what I’m calling  Haematomma accolens (and may or may not be wrong about). I got more than a little excited about the coastal lichen diversity in North Carolina. This was taken at Bald Head Island Conservatory.

[gbwnatureblog]

Graphis scripta, the script lichen, so-called because the narrow, curved, often forked, apothecia (spore producing bodies) look like runes or other writing. This species grows on the smooth bark of hardwood trees and is very abundant over much of the eastern United States and southern Canada around the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence River. Graphis scripta also occurs from Mexico north Oregon, USA to British Columbia, Canada and Alaska. In Europe it is found in Scandinavia, the UK and most continental European countries.

The apothecia in this group of lichens, which includes several other species and genera and broadly known as “script lichens”, are called “lirellae”. The word lireallae is from the Latin for “furrows” in reference to the furrowed or channeled appearance of the spore producing bodies.

The body of Graphis scripta is a thin grayish crust that is almost completely immersed into the bark substrate. The specimen above is growing on black ash (Fraxinus nigra) and is in typical form. By the way, the lichen in that photo is about 5 times larger than in life. Below is a photo of one at a more normal scale and also on black ash.

Lichens are symbiotic combinations of a fungus and one or more photosynthetic organisms (an algae and/or cyanobacteria) collectively called “photobionts”. Photobionts detected in Graphis scripta are the algae Printzina lagenifera and Trentepohlia umbrina, both in the green algae family Trentepohliaceae. Species of Trentepohlia can sometimes be found growing freely on the bark of trees or on damp rocks and are red or orange. The photo below is of a free-living Trentepohlia species on paper birch. To properly identify it requires careful microscopic examination (a subject for a future post).

References

Consortium of North American Lichen Herbaria (Graphis scripta)

Keys to the Lichens of Minnesota. Clifford Wetmore (revised 2005)

Lichens of North America. Irwin M. Brodo, Sylvia Duran Sharnoff, and Stephen Sharnoff (2001). Published by Yale University Press

New insights into diversity and selectivity of trentepohlialean lichen photobionts from the extratropics. Christina Hametner, Elfriede Stocker-Wörgötter, and Martin Grube. Symbiosis. Vol. 63:31-40 (2014).

Phylogentic Diversity of Trentepohlianean Algae Associated with Lichen-Forming Fungi. Matthew P. Nelson, Eimy Rivas Plata, Carrie J. Andrew, Robert Lucking, and H. Thornsten Lumbsh. Journal of Phycology. Vol. 47: 282-290 (2011).

Prinzia lagenifera coll. (Trentepohliales, Chlorophyta) epiphyllous in a boreal forest. Harri Harmaja. Annale Botanici Fennici. Vol 48:129-132 (2011).

Ways of Enlichenment (Graphis)

[lichenaday]

Halegrapha mucronata 

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[lichenaday]

Gyrographa saxigena

Script lichens are notorious for being a real pain-in-the-ass to ID visually, but every description I see for this species is covered in caveats about its official classification and synonymy, meaning that even microscopically and molecularly this lichen is proving to be a pain-in-the-ass. I love it. G. saxigena is a crustose, script lichen that (most likely) grows on sheltered seaside rocks or on siliceous rocks in humid, mild-temperate, old-growth forests. It has a thin, often endosubstratic, gray-brown thallus topped by black, lirelliform (linear or script-like) apothecia. These apothecia are not embedded in the substrate, and often grow together in little tangled bunches or networks. It has a trentapohlioid photobiont.

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